Simon Fujiwara

An eleven year old Asian actor stands in front of a painting and recounts the story of the artists’ first encounter with an abstract expressionist artwork, attempting to explain how it turned the artist gay. The Spanish bar the artists’ parents owned in dictatorship era Spain is reconstructed based on an erotic fantasy involving his father, Franco and an egg. A journey through China with a sixteen year old working class English girl produces a replica Terracotta Army based on casts from her body. The blueprint for New Pompidou - an invisible twin to the Centre Pompidou - stems from a dried rose stolen from the museum café in the year 2000.

Born in 1982 (London, UK) Simon Fujiwara has created a complex and rich body of interconnecting works that encompass performance, film, installations, sculptures and texts. Bringing personal experiences both real and imagined into contact with larger historical events, his expansive practice has been described as an ‘autobiographical journey through the architecture of modern life - constantly rebuilt as it is retold’. His exhibitions and projects often function as invisible structures in which players - family members, real-life friends, historic figures - and events past and the future cohabit and interact generating scenarios in which the real and the imagined are no longer distinguishable. Often appearing himself within his works and shifting into various guises, Fujiwara’s personal narratives form an unstable core from which the world is observed and re-performed, confronting us with our notions of truth, authenticity, morality and the credibility of the artist as narrator.

Simon Fujiwara studied architecture at Cambridge University and Fine Art at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. His work has been presented in group and solo exhibitions at institutions that include Tate St.Ives, UK, MoMA, NY, Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Kunstverein Braunschweig, and SFMoMA, San Francisco. His participation in international biennales includes the Venice, (2009), Sao Paulo (2010), Gwangjyu (2012), Shanghai (2012) and Sharjah (2013) Biennales among others. Key works are housed in public collections including the Tate Collection, Hamburger Kunsthalle and Prada Foundation. In 2009 he won the Art Foundation Fellowship for Interior Architecture and in 2010 he won both the Cartier Award and the prestigious Art Basel Statements Baloise Prize. He has published two artists books, The Museum of Incest and 1982.